Accuser, Family Laud Jackson in Video

Michael Jackson’s accuser and his family called the singer fatherly, compassionate, loving, generous and a blessing from God in a videotape viewed by jurors Friday at the pop star’s child-molestation trial.

The accuser’s 18-year-old sister told the jury that the extravagant praise was coerced from them by Jackson assistants waiting in the wings. However, her testimony was shaken in a relentless cross-examination by Jackson’s attorney, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., who got the college freshman to acknowledge telling a number of lies about the family’s experiences at Jackson’s Neverland ranch.

Also on Friday, she testified that she didn’t witness molestation, but saw “inappropriate touching” at Neverland. She said Jackson and her brother, then 13, were nestled on the singer’s bed and Jackson was “kissing him over and over on his head.” A younger brother, who was then 12, sat on a corner of the king-size bed.

The 40-minute videotape shown in court was arranged by Jackson’s handlers to quell a scandal that erupted after Jackson admitted in a TV broadcast that he enjoyed nonsexual sleepovers with young boys. A so-called rebuttal video aired on the Fox network in February 2003, but the footage of the family shown in court was, for reasons yet unexplained, not included.

In the video, the stylishly coiffed mother lauds Jackson.

“God elected to work through Michael,” she said with apparent feeling. “We may be broken but Michael fixed us.”

Prosecutors claim that she and her three children were held captive at Neverland before they agreed to the tribute. Defense attorneys claim the mother is a con artist who was trying to wring money from Jackson with bogus accusations.

On tape, the family appeared tired. At one point, Jackson’s accuser yawned deeply: The family had been driven from Neverland in Santa Barbara County to a producer’s home studio in the San Fernando Valley sometime after midnight.

During a break when the mother and her children thought they weren’t being taped, they joshed with one another, laughing. Defense attorneys contend they couldn’t have been that lighthearted if they really were under threat from Jackson employees just off-camera.

Jackson’s alleged victim, a boy who nearly died from cancer just a couple of years earlier, called the entertainer “a loving, kind, humble man.”

“All he wanted to do was good,” the boy said. “And happiness -- that’s all he cared about. I took to him really quick.”

Jackson got to know the family in 2000, after the extremely ill child told a family friend in show business that he wanted to meet the entertainer.

In a 2003 TV documentary, the two held hands and the boy rested his head on Jackson’s shoulder.

Prosecutors allege the first sexual contact occurred at Neverland, a couple of weeks following the damaging documentary and the night after the rebuttal video was shot.

On the witness stand Thursday, the boy’s sister had come across as sympathetic and poised. But under cross-examination Friday, she was resistant, responding to dozens of Mesereau’s questions with “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall.”

On Thursday, she told the jury that Jackson poured wine for her brothers and herself two years ago in the wine cellar beneath Neverland’s video arcade. But on Friday, she reluctantly acknowledged that she didn’t specifically tell police that Jackson poured the wine.

“I was young back then,” she told Mesereau. “I didn’t know that I had to give every detail to be right.”

The lawyer insisted she was lying. “Did prosecutors tell you to use that stock phrase?” he asked. “About being young?”

She replied that she hadn’t been told what to say on the stand, and that she had never discussed the case with her family.

The young woman also tripped on questions about an interview conducted by Los Angeles social workers concerned about allegations that her mother was unfit and that Jackson was a pedophile.

In court, she admitted lying when she told the social workers that a girlfriend always accompanied her to Neverland. She also told Mesereau that her mother lied to the social workers when she said that she was always at the main residence on the sprawling ranch, keeping an eye on her children. The mother now contends she was effectively under house arrest in a guest cottage.

“So,” Mesereau concluded about the session with social workers, “you would have lied about some things and not about others, right?”

That was right, she responded.

Prosecutors say that Jackson was hoping to send the family to Brazil to get them out of the way.

Asked whether they screamed or ran or tried to alert anyone about their alleged abduction when they were taken to a government office for passports, the girl said the family kept quiet, but she reminded Mesereau about the ever-present Jackson aides.

“That’s how scary they were,” she said.